


River Gods

by aderyn



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Post-Reichenbach/reunion, TRF, resuscitations, water & bridges & maybe some Sirens, ways of breathing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-14
Updated: 2012-06-14
Packaged: 2017-11-07 18:19:24
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,424
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/434000
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aderyn/pseuds/aderyn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s the middle of the night, the middle of a case, the middle of a precipitous week...</p>
<p>“Need a few hours,” says John, indicating his bed.”You too.”</p>
<p>About an hour after that Sherlock’s sitting on the edge of John’s bed deducing the air, and John feels the hot anvil of his hipbone against his back and ten minutes after that he’s holding a cold flannel to Sherlock’s head as he rolls restless as a beam sea in the bed, conversing quite seriously with a green deity that lives under Tower Bridge (and the Ribble and the Tweed and Peg O’Nell)...</p>
<p>After that he dies. After that he comes back.</p>
            </blockquote>





	River Gods

**Author's Note:**

> With thanks to:
> 
> [ greenjudy](http://archiveofourown.org/users/greenjudy/pseuds/greenjudy), for motivation, conversation (s), perfectly-put prose coaching, and dream-wrangling.
> 
> [ Moranion](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Moranion/pseuds/Moranion), for saying “shipwreck.” 
> 
> [ whitefang3927](http://archiveofourown.org/users/whitefang3927/pseuds/whitefang3927) and  
> [ ScienceofObssession](http://archiveofourown.org/users/ScienceofObsession/pseuds/ScienceofObsession), for inspirational back-and-forth.

_For M. and P., my river creatures_

**_~Brigid~_ ** __

It’s the middle of the night, the middle of a case, the middle of a precipitous week. (Central London drips with it; the Gulf Stream is conjuring downpours up out of the North Atlantic and they’re coursing over Britain in threes, hell-bent on the Continent.)

“Need a few hours,” says John, indicating his bed.”You too.”

Sherlock doesn’t say no, but he doesn’t go. He coughs, shucks the coat, knits his brows, picks up the violin.

He settles it between his chin and shoulder at an odd angle, and John can tell something’s off but he’s too tired to find out what.

About an hour after that Sherlock’s sitting on the edge of John’s bed deducing the air, and John feels the hot anvil of his hipbone against his back and ten minutes after that he’s holding a cold flannel to Sherlock’s head as he rolls restless as a beam sea in the bed, conversing quite seriously with a green deity that lives under Tower Bridge (and the Ribble and the Tweed and Peg O’Nell). Something about salt and virgins and water horses, he says; it’s positively subaquatic, the case vanished in the flood. “Shh,”says John, like he’s the dry land. ( _Break here; break here.)_ Sherlock cannot, as usual, be diverted, so John lets him run until he sleeps. Something about the ford at Battersea, he says, and John fetches another flannel and lies down experimentally and then it’s dawn and Sherlock’s up again, wrung-out and composed, calling for John to get up too, as if nothing at all’s happened.

Light’s coming in through the sheers, nacreous and new.

John looks at Sherlock cross-eyed, upside-down, and sideways.

“Get back in bed, for Christ’s sake. You’re delusional.”

“Lestrade’s already texted me three times,” Sherlock says, tugging at his shirt (It’s always three times; what is this, a fairy tale?)

Sherlock’s on his feet, somehow mostly dressed; his clothes have that faint seabird sheen they’ve always got (where did those come from; it’s so bloody early and he was just practically _incandescent_ wasn’t he, talking to a bridge-fairy for fuckssake), but now he’s buttoning up, clearing his throat and making ready to alight into the world like the hermetic creature he so manifestly is.

“Sherlock,” John says, but he knows it’s futile.

John gets up, frowning, wearing his unslept soldier-face with a side of bleary-eyed doctor. 

The dawn is quite beautiful. Sherlock looks like death. Move along; nothing to see here.

*******

 After the case (a triple murder, not domestic, interesting for a time) is put to bed, Sherlock goes to bed for the better part of a week while John tends him with water and rose hips and zinc and the green shawl of Brigid and other remedies proven and unproven and thinks _is this why I became ...whatever it is I’ve become? Yes, for the love of Christ, it is._

“You know, you’re not completely invulnerable,” he says to Sherlock, like it’s the first time he’s said that. “You ought to be more aware of yourself as you...”  He makes an invoking gesture with his left hand-- _what would I have said when I was...more philosophy and less action?_ “You know, as you relate to time and space.”

“That’s very Newtonian, John,” Sherlock says, his voice drowning a bit on the lingua-alveolars, “I’m certainly aware of my mortality in both the physical and the philosophical senses.  As are you.” (Hence: _does not need to be conversed about despite deletion of certain key elements of Newton._ )  He puts his fingers to his vocal cords and presses once, wincing.

“Stop talking,” John says, not too impatiently, looking over his shoulder for the mash-up of tea, herb, and honey he brought in not long ago; ah, he’s good at this, isn’t he.

“Then stop saying things that require existential empathy,” Sherlock says, clearly enough.

“Did you just say ‘empathy’?” says John, feeling his forehead.

“And ‘existential’ as well,” Sherlock says. “I’m aware that I don’t...really, John, I’m not delirious."  He tilts his head to and angle John's never seen him achieve before; it's almost bird-like, a bit of extra give in the cervical vertebrae at C5-6, as though he's trying to fit John into a new frame. _(Strange familiar creature, what are you_?) Weirder-looking still because he’s lying down and John‘s sitting on the bed mid-ribcage. The sheets are a sheeny grey- blue. The light in here is just gorgeous.

“You are, actually. Much of the time,” says John.

Sherlock removes John’s hand from his forehead, not too impatiently.

"I’m aware,” Sherlock says.

*******

After that he dies. After that he comes back.

 

**_~Breath~_ **

_“Of course the water is very cold, but after a few seconds it seems to coat the body in a kind of warm, silvery skin, as if one had acquired the scales of a merman. The challenged blood rejoices with a new strength.  Yes, this is my element.”—Iris Murdoch, The Sea The Sea_

When they pull the teenage girl from the wreckage of the drowned Peugeot, she isn't breathing; there's no pulse. John goes down on his knees and starts compressions and Sherlock gets down beside him and gives him a strange, sharp-elbowed assist. “That's good work, boys,” says Lestrade,  and John hands off to the paramedics and his mouth is fixed in a straight line but Sherlock shakes his arms out and there’s  the faint ripple of a smile.  Lestrade’s hands brush their shoulders as he watches the girl being loaded into the ambulance.  She looks too much like one of his daughters, an English hybrid tea sort ( _Rosa rosa,_ Mrs. Herbert Stevens maybe, or Day Breaker) who appears perfectly natural with buds twisted into her hair, or wearing a long dress of indigo silk with a diaphanous underskirt of green.  
  
 *******  
 Blink.  Molly. “Come awake, Sherlock, hurry.”  She palms his shoulder, glances over hers, leans over almost to lip level as if she's going to kiss him.  Blink. “There you go; there you are,” she says.  “More storeys than you're used to, yeah?” she says, her voice trembling no more than a little.  Lighten things, she thinks, kick upwards out of the gloom. (Water dripping in the lab sinks; blood pooling on the roof above them.) She puts her fingers to his neck, almost abashed at the currents there. “You're all right.” (He isn't.) He blinks at her, an aquatic creature slipped from the stream ( _That's grief, yeah?)_  She bends over him, inhales; exhales, let's him go.

*******  
Sherlock smokes on the balcony of a hotel room with towel thrown over his head and water from his drenched hair dripping onto his shoulders.  Imagines his alveoli trapping the black particulates like tiny, internal fishweirs.  Oh this ridiculous net of language; he can’t think what he wants except John’s voice chiding him. The ford at Battersea. Irene saying “yes you are” (not to him). Smoke.

It’s been a long time since he’s seen the River Thames, the mist lifting over  the bridges in the morning,  (ah, the pontifex, the ancient bridgemaker; Waterloo, the Bridge of Sorrow, the bridge with the most suicides,  the Book of the Dead at the headquarters of the river police in Wapping; Hammersmith, saved from explosion by a particularly alert hairdresser), oh and John’s hands wrapped around the first tea of the day, wiping down the counters with a soap-soaked rag.

*******

While Sherlock is gone John dreams of him washed up on the riverbank--no breath,  eyes gone to pearls, hair full of tiny crustaceans, one hand twined with ragged twists of mooring rope-- and he gets down on his knees while the onlookers (Mycroft, his stiff suit soaked through,  Molly and Greg in crowns of coral and dock) stand solemnly by, and then Sherlock himself strides up the bank with the wind in his coattails, looks down at his drowned self,  his still ribs, looks at John there on the ground: “Clearly a suicide. Moving along.”  John feels the sun waking up in his throat, wakes up for real, puts his face in his hands.

*******

While Sherlock is gone John dreams of the mother of a childhood friend, dear to him, a second mum, spending her last days in the oncology ward; this time he’s her doctor, and here she is, going under in her own body, third-spacing fluid out of the vessels while he leans in the doorway helpless and past detachment, tears streaming down his face. She’s not  the only one who’s slipped from him, but in the dream Sherlock isn’t gone at all, because he walks  right through the double doors of the ward,  anchors John with his hands and says, “You’re a very good doctor John; a very good doctor.” He says it over until John feels he’ll break, and then he wakes up, puts his face in his hands.

*******

While Sherlock is gone John dates a woman whose true name he never learns. He’s not sure she’s of his element. Or perhaps she's of his element but not of his continent(s), unless one of those is Atlantis. 

“Come in,” the mermaid says to John, “You’re tired, and the water’s fine.”  She’s not really a mermaid, of course; she’s a marine biologist (Marina?  Mer? That’s not what she’s called, but that’s how he thinks of her. ) And although dark-eyed marine biologists certainly exist in England and all of the British Isles, of course her eyes are blue-- or rather, tidal, mutable.

“I know a drowning man when I see one,” she says, and she means it literally, a colleague having nearly gone under off one of her research boats, the _RV Virgo_ , in 2003. And of course she’s right about him, too.  Sometimes John wakes up in the same position he fell asleep in, beached, face in the sand, sucking salt air against the incoming tide.

M. spins him anecdotes about treasure off the Anglesey coast; gold and pearls and Bonnie Prince Charlie.( _I’m not the Receiver of Wreck,_ thinks John _; I can’t._ ) She says she can teach him to breathe underwater, or rather to hold his breath for a very long time, and he does; he does for quite a while, ( _I can’t_ )  and then she takes a post on the _RRV Shackleton_ and they part, amicably, down at the docks.

Sometimes she Skypes him from the sea, smiling.     

*******

Twenty years later Sherlock says nearly the same thing to him, (you’re tired, and the water’s fine) as they’re walking along the seashore one August. ( _And what do the river gods say?_ John thinks. _They want their salt, and their locks of hair,)_

 It’s too early to retire, and the Thames calls them back.

*******

“I’ve come to deliver this,” says Anthea, stepping out of the car into the sun.

“What’s that?” says John.

Her smart suit is blue. Her eyes are calm and full of reflections.

“Transparency,” she says.

 It’s difficult to take a deep breath with a broken rib, a punctured lung, pleurisy, congestive heart failure, a hard blow to the celiac plexus. There are several other scenarios in which it is also very difficult, and this (submersed) is one of them.  

*******

Sherlock comes back to him permeable, armed, and with lungs full of water. John wakes to him coughing and realises he’s begun planning. _Your eyes are not stones or pearls or the bones of drowned fishermen. You are not a dream. You never were_.   He slips downstairs, flips on the light, takes Sherlock by the shoulders (enough), sticks the earpieces in his ears and listens to the sound of drowning. (On an X-ray: patchy opacities, the fog they’ve always been finding their way through.)

*******

Sally Donovan coughs softly, puts a hand on John’s arm and takes it away almost before he notices.  She’s come to Baker Street to say something to Sherlock, but he's sleeping; he's been sleeping for days.

It’s been a long while since Sally's wanted to say something this badly. She’s learned to submerge that part of herself, not to default to apology as a matter of self-preservation; one cannot even hint at being sorry for existing and stay afloat at the Met.   She has, so she can survive this, this wreck she had a part in. She clears her throat again, looks at John, his sorrowful, weary, salvage- face; they’ve seen a great many things, the two of them, that most won’t: sinkings and vanishings and revivals and returns.

It’s still early, though. John won’t ask her how long she’s had the cough, or let her come in to watch Sherlock breathe.

*******

Sherlock crests the stairs, breaks over the threshold, tugs his gun out of his pocket and tosses it on the kitchen table.  It’s too wet to fire; who knows when it’ll be dry again.

 He’s damp and winded and the flat smells of salt, and a candle Mrs. Hudson insisted on lighting earlier.

John sits him down at the table, wipes the mud off his face with a dishrag, prods the gash over his eye, counts the breaths without thinking.

“You’ve been smoking again.”

“Yes,” Sherlock says, and John takes his face in his hands.

*******  
221B is full of smoke, the expiration of an experiment or just breakfast. Mrs. Hudson’s feet on the stairs, stopping at the door when she hears their voices.  “Sherlock.”  John: frustrated and fond. Then something drowned out. Sherlock the low talker, for all his theatrics not a projector.  She stops, rests her hands on her diaphragm, turns, shouldn’t be listening, smiles at the exhalations as she’s turning to go down, the air cleansed again.

*******

What do the river gods say? (John thinks.) 

_That the subterranean streams, the Effra, the Tyburn, the Peck, the Graveney, flow  to the Thames, that the Moselle flows to the Lea, that  the Lea flows to the Thames, that the Thames (Tamesis, Tafwys, dark grey)  flows to the sea, that the rivers flow to the sea, that the sacrifice has been made, that the gifts have been left,  that he’s a right excellent crosser of boundaries,  that he’ll be back; he’ll be  back, as sure as the rivers flow down to the sea._

*****

“The light is…rather beautiful from this angle,” Sherlock says, pointing out the rays; John ducks under the angle of his arm, to look at the bridges in the magic hour.

“I’m aware,” John says.

It hasn't been long, not long at all, since John found himself on his knees on the bank, and he bent down his head to offer his breath.

 

*****

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by: 
> 
> [Gods of the River and Bridge (from the Cross River Traffic Project)](http://www.urban75.org/london/river-gods.html)   
> [Cross River Traffic Project (book)](http://www.fandmpublications.co.uk/pages/crt1.htm)   
> [Thames photos](http://www.urban75.org/photos/london/south1.html)   
> [Local Hero,written and directed by Bill Forsyth(for Marina the mermaid).](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0085859)
> 
>    
> “Cold dark deep and absolutely clear,  
> element bearable to no mortal,  
> to fish and to seals ...”—Elizabeth Bishop, “At the Fishhouses”


End file.
